As with any significant purchase, it always pays to shop around a bit before committing. That's the key message in this French commercial for JeChange insurance. However, the way they go about making the shop around analogy is, shall we say, a bit out of the norm for an insurance agency. But, this is France we're talking about and if stereotypical legends are to be believed, they are keenly attuned to the importance of sex...even if it doesn't end up being a deciding factor.

New York hotel, Yotel, is on the hunt for an efficient luggage handler. And with help from Cunning, the hotel held interviews to find the perfect bellhop. All manner of robots, from RoboCop to the Terminator to R2D2 to Number 5 to that Japanese robot to Data to AI boy to Roomba to Hal and many others were interviewed. Hilarious stuff.

Turns out the whole thing is a riff on the fact Yotel has an actual robot that stores baggage for guests. Pretty cool.

There's strange commercials and then there's this commercial from production company OPC Detroit for Poker Wingman, a site which promises to be your wing man as you gamble your life savings away.

Every once in a while we need some luck. Every once in a while we believe rabbits feet will bring us that luck. And every once in a very great while that rabbit comes calling. And he wants his feet back.

We're going to go out on a limb here to say Walmart had nothing whatsoever to do with the creation of this video in which New Orleans rapper Mr. Ghetto, accompanied by two booty shaking dancers, prattles on about the wonders of shopping at Walmart. All we can say is it's pretty fucking strange. But it will likely get Walmart more for their money than any recent marketing effort has.

With almost 56,000 views on YouTube in one day, the video is equally liked and disliked by viewers. Predictably, several comments center on race and the sad state of rap. Over at Walmart, we have to believe the marketing folks are either high fiving each other right now or shaking their heads in embarrassment they're associated with this dreadful oddity.

We missed this one when it came out a couple of weeks ago but thanks to Copyranter, who published it today, we can share it with you now. We all know Stride gum has done some interesting work over the years, most notably, the work it did with Matt Harding who traveled around the globe to do his strange and contagious dance with the people of the world...all sponsored by Stride. Seriously fun and moving stuff.

This time, the brand, working with JWT which, sadly, just made staff cuts today, is going a bit darker. In a commercial that centers on a woman who just lost her husband and travels home with his ashes only to have them fall to the floor to discover...well...just watch the commercial to find out.

It's no feel-good Matt Harding video but it does smack you with the brand's message; Stride gum lasts a very long time.

Perhaps during the last week or so while fast forwarding through commercials, you may have caught a peek at the odd combination of Rachel Bilson and a box of condoms. You think to yourself, "condom ads on TV...no big deal. After all, TV is rife with penile stiffening products, why not condoms too?"

Had you paused and rewound to watch the commercial, you would have seen Bilson who, stuck in a traffic jam, decides to hop out of her car, run over the tops of other cars to chase an 18 wheeler filled with condoms.

Oh wait. Had you actually paid attention while watching the commercial you would have realized it wasn't a commercial for condoms at all. Rather it was Unilever's U.S. introduction of the very questionably (for this country) named Magnum ice cream.

Online forum network CrowdGather is launching a new fragrance aimed at gamers and geeks who frequent online communities. Called Erox, the fragrance will contain a combination of human pheromones that are said to "increase feelings of arousal, excitement, social warmth and friendliness in both men and women.

CrowdGather hopes to combine social media with affiliate marketing to develop an online marketing strategy with mass appeal so that all the geeks who will, one day, inherit the earth will smell good when doing so.

Agencies Mizbala and twentythree created an eerie location-based campaign for If I Die, a Facebook application that lets people record a message that will only be published after they die. Of course, no one think they're going to die anytime soon so people needed a bit of prompting.

Mizbala used th APIs of popular location services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Twitter and Google Latest to track checkins all over the world. Once they located a person, they'd place a call to the location the person had checked into and asked to have the establishment to put the person on the line. Once they had the person on the line, they'd leave a creepy message and tell the person to go to the If I Die Facebook app.

You can check out the demo call to Mashable's Adam Ostrow in this video to see what it's all about. Did the campaign work? Oh yes it did. Without any advertising, the campaign received lots of press in newspapers, blogs, radio and TV coverage which resulted in an 800 percent increase in recorded messages being left on "If I Die".

In a new campaign from Vitro for Newcastle Brown ale, difficult situations are somewhat alleviated with a sip of Newscastle which brings about the lighter side of dark. Which, of course, is a very good thing because no one wants to lose two ankles when they can lose just one or have to pay a lawyer a lot of money to get you out of jail.

As with all beer commercials, we're not quite sure how this sells beer. Unless, of course, the brand is trying to target loan defaulters and criminals. Which, come to think of it, may not be a bad approach. After all, people in such situations are under a lot of stress and alcohol is well known to, at least temporarily, alleviate stress. Right. Makes perfect sense now.